The Porto Metro Line Urban Insertion project, between the municipalities of Vila do Conde and Póvoa de Varzim, constituted a major investment in terms of mobility throughout the Porto Metropolitan Area. By territorially expanding accessibilities, the Metro also assumed itself as a potential pretext for an intervention in the city, promoting urban regeneration along the created network.
With the coordination of Eduardo Souto Moura, the project implied a complex interdisciplinarity and the involvement of several actors, from different areas, complementary in the process. In search of an identity for the project, along with the various specialties, Souto Moura defined the network's architectural guidelines which, based on the inflexible rules of its functioning, tend towards a deliberate uniformity in its architectural characterization. On this basis, later, the unfolding of the project by several other architects, was supported in the meaning of this transformation.
Line P of the Metro, between Porto and Póvoa de Varzim, was developed in the office of Architect José Gigante from 2003 onwards in the extensions inserted in the municipalities of Vila do Conde and Póvoa de Varzim. Associated with the layout of the old railway line, it fits into two different contexts along its route, which, inherently, boosted the direction of the intervention.
To the South of Rio Ave, there is a markedly rural landscape, with scattered and unrelated stations, providing essentially local framing projects. Due to the importance that they naturally assume in the restructuring of the surroundings, the stations become polarizers of the local space, creating new centralities not only associated with their functional status, but also with the new network of road and pedestrian articulations that the projects choose as the revitalization of the places.
To the North of Rio Ave, the layout unfolds in the urban space, opening up a new city front, translating into a more comprehensive design that "sews" to the pre-existence the different articulations subsequent to the layout of this new urban structure.
A new avenue accompanies the Metro platform throughout this length, being, in general, complemented by cycle paths, by additional road lanes serving the buildings and streets of the new urban front to be created. The adaptation of this system to the various situations determined by the pre-existing buildings, namely with regard to the alignment of the facades, seeks to make them participate in the set as if they had always been part of that idea of an urban front, refusing any intention of demarcating the new intervention, rather preferring to dilute it in a perspective of continuity with the gradual consolidation of the constructed tissue.
Location. Municipalities of Vila do Conde and Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal
Date. 2005 | 2012
Architecture. José Gigante, João Gomes and M. Fernando Santos
Collaboration. Rui Carvalho, Pedro Barata Castro, Andreia Costa, Ana Pedrosa, Cristina Fernandes, José Almeida and Ângelo Lopes
Photography. Luís Ferreira Alves